Discussion
Points and Quotes for Studio Logic and the Practice of Production
and for Questions concerning Methods of Working
I
want to consider how we organize the studio. What does the "neutral"
or "practical" norm of having each student delinate a working space
by the placement of a desk suggest? Lets imagine, and hopefully manifest
another way of working in the studio.
Start
with an analysis of:
what
is the present studio organization what values are represented
by this system, what practicalities, what are its strengths and lim
its?
list
the activities that happen in the studio
what
other types of activites/orientations could happen?
what
physical reorientations of the space/materials in the space are possible
to support different studio "logics" or "logics of production".
For
instance, instead of imagining single spaces in which all of an individuals
activities take place (i.e. reading, making work, meeting with faculty,
etc) what if different zones of activity are considered. For instance,
zones of commonality, display, action, seclusion, etc.
The organization of the studio, is in some sense a potential model,
or at least related to the space of the gallery. The artist is often
organizing elements in space.
Gallery as studio, studio as art: Ian Wallace, Dieter Roth, Kurt
Schwitters Merzbau, Gregor Schneider
Famous Studios: Brancusi,
| On Social Space from The
Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre, 1974 |
Art and architecture Historian and theorist
Anthony Vidler offers a passage in his book Warped Space which
sums up well a history of relation between visual art and architecture
and the attendant transformation of space by moving images |
A social space is not a socialized space.
The would-be general theory of the 'socialization' of whatever
precedes society-i.e.nature, biology...and so on-is really just
the basic tenet of an ideology...The notion of a apace
which is at first empty but is later filled by a social life and
modified by it, also depends on this hypotehtical initial 'purity'
, identified as 'nature' as as a sort of ground zero of human reality...Of
any actual historically generated space, however, it would be more
accurate to say that it played a socializing role (by means of
amultiplicity of networks) than that it was itself socialized).
Is
not social space always, and simultaneously, both a field
of action (offering
its extension to the deplyment of projects and practical intentions)
and a basis of action (a set of places whence energies
derive and whiter energies are directed)? Is it not at once actual (given)
and potential (locus of possibilities)? Is it not at once quantitative (measurable
by means of units of measurement) and qualitative (as
concrete extension where unreplenished energies run out, where
distance is measured in terms of fatigue or in terms of time needed
for activity)? And is it not at once a collection of material (objects,
things) and an ensemble of materiel (tools—and the procedures
necessary to make efficient use of tools and of things in general)?
191
The Bahaus group, as artists associated
in oder to advance the total project of a toal art, discovered,
along with Klee, that an observer could move around any object
in social space—including such objects as houses, public buildings
and palaces—and in so doing go beyond scrutinizing or studying
it under a single or special aspect. Space opened up to perception,
to conceptualization, just as it did to practical action. And the
artist passed from objects in space to the concept of space itself.
Avant-garde painters of the same period reached very similar conclusions:
all aspects of an object could be considered simultaneously, and
this simultaneity preserved and summarized a temporal sequence.
This had several consequences:
1) A new consciousness of space emerged whereby space
(an object in its surroundings) was explored, sometiems by deliberately
reducing it to its outlinee or plan and to the flat surface of
the canvas, and sometimes,by contrast by breaking up and rotating
planes, so as to reconstitute depth of space in the picture plane.
tThis gave rice to a very specific dialectic.
2. The facade— as face direct towards
the observer and as priviledged side or aspect of awork of art
or a monument—disappeared.
(Fascism, however, placed an increased emphasis on facades, thus
opting for total 'spectacularization' as early as the 1920's.)
3. Global space established itself in the abstact as
a void waiting to be filled, as a medium waiting to be colonized.
How this could be done was a problem solved only later by the social
practice of capitalism: eventually , however, this space would
come to be filled by commercial images, signs and objects. This
development would in turn result in the advent of the pseudoconcept
of the environment (which begs the question; the environment of
whom or of what?). |
The ability of art to construct a critical
model for architectural practice has been evident since the Renaissance
reinvention of perspectival space…The modernist avant-gardes,
with their emphasis on movement and aesthetic synthesthesia,
filmic montage and cubist rotation, produced their own image
of an architecture transformed by spatial performance, the body
in space acting as a device by which to undermine the canonical
virtues of monumentality. More recently, performance, installations
and land and earth projects have often intersected with and doubled
as architectural invention. All have in some way transformed
the space of architectural projection, the manner in which architecture
defines its relations with moving and sensing subjects.
Vidler, Warped Space, 59 |
| |
Questions
concerning Methods of Working
Not only what the artist makes but how they work is important. Student
artists, rather naturally tend to develop the habits of working in the
mode of a student. That is they research, then produce, then argue the
results...the reproduce an academic logic. What is an "artistic logic"?
This is of course a question almost as rhetorically impossible as "what
is art." However asking the question allows for reflection on unexamined
ways of working.
A note on "ways of doing" praxis and poesis:
Poesis:
Praxis And Poesis In Aristotle's Practical Philosophy
In Aristotle's philosophy there are two distinct kinds of human activity:
Praxis and Poesis.
In the first kind, [Praxis] the activity is an end in
itself; in the second [Poesis] is a means to an end. In order to understand
these two kinds of activity, we must distinguish between two Aristotelian
concepts of telos: (1) telos as the goal of the activity; (2) telos as
the activity itself.
Poesis:
Aristotle regards praxis and poesis to be generically different concepts.
In the following passage from the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explicitly
sets out the difference between them:
...action and making are different kinds of thing, since
making aims at an end distinct from the act of making, whereas in doing,
the end cannot be other than theact itself. (1140 b 1-5) Aristotle's
treatment of the subject seems straightforward enough. Nevertheless,
the passage contains a much greater complexity of thought than meets
the eye. On the one hand Aristotle refers to an activity whose end (telos)
is different from the activity itself; on the other hand he speaks of
an activity whose telos is the activity itself. The first is poesis,
and the second praxis.
hcc.haifa.ac.il/~balaban/Doc/PAPERS/ Balaban-Prax&PoesisAristot.pdfThe
What Leo Steinberg has to say about the way American artists work:
From Michele DeCerteau: The Practice of Everyday Life,
1984
Usage, or consumption
Many, often remarkable, works have sought to study the representations
of a society, on the one hand, and its modes of behavior, on the other.
Building on our knowledge of these social phenomena, it seems both
possible and necessary to determine the use to which they are put by
groups or individuals. For example, the analysis of the images broadcast
by television (representation) and of the time spent watching television
(behavior) should be complemented by a study of what the cultural
consumer "makes" or "does" during this time and with
these images.
The same goes for the use of urban space, the products purchased in the
supermarket, the stories and legends distributed by the newspapers, and
so on.
The "making" in question is a production, a poiesis —but a hidden
one, because it is scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems
of "production" (television, urban development, commerce, etc.),
and
because the steadily increasing expansion of these systems no longer
leaves "consumers" any place in which they can indicate what
they make
or do with the products of these systems. To a rationalized, expansionist
and at the same time centralized, clamorous, and spectacular production
corresponds another production, called "consumption." The latter
is
devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently
and
almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own
products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by
a dominant economic order.
...
"…there must be a logic of these practices…What
is an art of "way of making"? …From this point of
view "popular culture,' as well as a while literature called "popular," take
on a different aspect: they represent themselves essentially a "art
of making" this or that, ie., as combinatory or utilizing modes
of consumption. These practices bring into play a "popular" ration,
a way of thinking invested in a way of acting, an art of combination
which cannot be dissociated from an art of using."
de Certeau: General Introduction, xv
Artists (in no particular order) who use a variety
of distinct logics in their ways/methods of making
-Jackson Pollock
-Andy Warhol
-Ilya Kabakov
-Isa Genzken
-Tomas Hirschhorn
-Jeff Wall
-Robert Smithson
-Tino Segal
-Sophie Calle
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